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March 30 - May 6, 2018
“The soldiers evidently supposed [the warriors] were few in number…,” Yellow Nose recalled. “Their mistake was soon apparent as the Indians seemed really to be springing from the ground.
“There were hundreds of warriors,” Kate Bighead recalled, “many more than one might have thought could hide themselves in those small gullies.” The troopers of C Company suddenly realized that they were outnumbered by more than twenty to one.
Of all the many acts of bravery during the Custer battle, none was more remarked upon by the Indians than when Yellow Nose counted coup with a Seventh Cavalry flagstaff.
The Cheyenne Two Moons, on the other hand, claimed that this particular officer had “long black hair and a mustache.” C Company’s Lieutenant Harrington fit that description, and since his company was the first to be attacked that afternoon, he had more opportunities than any other officer to distinguish himself by courageously covering the retreat of his men.
Some of these were old-style muzzle loaders and single-shot rifles, but a startlingly large number of warriors, perhaps as many as three hundred, possessed modern repeating rifles manufactured by Henry and Winchester capable of firing seventeen rounds without reloading.
Custer’s battalion, with its single-shot carbines, was overwhelmingly outgunned.
By all accounts, the rapidity of fire was extraordinary. “The shooting was quick, quick,” Two Moons told an interpreter. “Pop—pop—pop, very fast.”
Answering as best they could with their carbines, Calhoun’s troopers, who were deployed in a semicircle with Calhoun and his second lieu tenant, John Crittenden, exhorting them from behind, fired off round after round. “The soldiers stood in line,” Red Hawk remembered, “and made a very good fight.
Just as devastating as the Henry and Winchester repeating rifles were the Indians’ arrows. If half of the two thousand warriors fired ten arrows each during the engagement, that would have been a total of ten thousand arrows, or about forty arrows per soldier. When combined with the roar of guns and the acrid clouds of black powder smoke, this deadly rain of steel-tipped arrows did much to harry both the soldiers and the horses, many of which were gathered in a draw behind Calhoun Hill and were becoming increasingly difficult to manage.
The Hunkpapa Moving Robe Woman, who was still intent on avenging the death of her brother Deeds, noticed that some of the mounted soldiers were “holding the reins of eight or ten horses.”
As some of Gall’s warriors waved their blankets and others fired on the soldiers, the horses leapt and whinnied and, after yanking free from the holders, stampeded for the river. So many horses poured out of the hollow that many of the Indians to the west assumed they were being charged by the enemy. Only later did they realize that the horses they’d fired upon had been without any riders.
By riding his pony through a slight gap in the forty-yard-wide ridge, Crazy Horse managed singlehandedly to break the Right Wing in half. “Crazy Horse was the bravest man I ever saw…,” marveled the Arapaho Waterman. “All the soldiers were shooting at him, but he was never hit.”
Inevitably adding to the panic and confusion was the immobilization of the company’s commander when a gunshot shattered Keogh’s left leg and severely injured his horse, Comanche. As the company’s sergeants gathered around their fallen leader, the warriors pounced, and I Company’s soldiers “were all,” Gall remembered, “killed in a bunch.”
Today the cluster of a dozen and a half marble headstones, all of them grouped in a hollow on the eastern side of Battle Ridge, testifies to the terrifying swiftness of the slaughter.
Unlike every other body in the group, Keogh’s was left untouched. Hanging from his neck was a medallion with the image of the Lamb of God known as an Agnus Dei. Some have speculated that it was out of respect for this sacred object that the warriors chose not to mutilate Keogh’s body.
Many of the troopers were so confounded by the intensity of the fighting that they simply gave up. “These soldiers became foolish,” Red Horse remembered, “many throwing away their guns and raising their hands saying, ‘Sioux, pity us; take us prisoners….’ None were left alive.”
For Standing Bear, there was little joy in killing such a helpless enemy. “When we rode into these soldiers,” he later told his son, “I really felt sorry for them, they looked so frightened…. Many of them lay on the ground, with their blue eyes open, waiting to be killed.”
Wooden Leg saw a warrior stagger, fall, then woozily rise to a stand. When the cloud of smoke and dust parted slightly, he realized that the warrior’s entire lower jaw had been shot away. Wooden Leg turned and vomited into a nearby clump of sagebrush.
Ahead was a soldier with his carbine raised. Unlike so many troopers that day, this soldier wanted to fight. When White Bull charged at him, the trooper threw aside his weapon and wrestled White Bull to the ground.
Of the approximately 115 troopers of Keogh’s Right Wing, only about 20 made it to Custer and the Left Wing.
Sitting Bull had sought to consolidate his forces from the start. Rather than seek out the enemy (as the young warriors had forced him to do at the Rosebud Fight), his intention all along had been to let the soldiers come to him. In the face of Custer’s hyperactive need to do too much, it had proven a brilliant strategy.
As a child, Sitting Bull had been known as “Slow” because of his unusually methodical manner. At the Battle of the Little Bighorn, this lifelong habit of carefully studying a situation before he acted had contributed to one of his people’s greatest victories.
Soon Iron Hawk was on top of another soldier and pounding him over the head with his wooden bow. “I was very mad,” he told an interpreter, “because the women and children had run away scared and I was thinking about this when I did this killing.”
After the fire of 1983, archaeologists discovered some facial bones near Deep Ravine. The bones were later determined to be from a man in his midthirties whose teeth displayed the wear pattern of a pipe smoker. Since it was also established that the man was of French-Lakota ancestry, this could only have been Mitch Boyer.
Even if he was destined to die, he said, he could take consolation in knowing that he’d already killed so many Lakota that they could never even the score. Apparently, not even Boyer had anticipated this terrible a result. After the Battle of the Little Bighorn, his debt in Lakota lives had been paid in full.
By this point Custer may already have suffered his first of two gunshot wounds—a bullet just below the heart. The blast would have knocked him to the ground but not necessarily killed him. Alive but mortally wounded, America’s most famous Indian fighter could no longer fight.
That evening on Last Stand Hill, as he lay on the ground with a gunshot wound to the chest, it may have been his brother Tom who came to his aid. Two days later the brothers were found within fifteen feet of each other, and the possibility exists that rather than see his wounded brother tortured to death, Tom shot Custer through the head. Whatever the case may be, Custer’s second bullet wound was through the left temple.
Tom Custer appears to have been one of the last to die. If the intense mutilation inflicted on Tom’s body is any indication, he fought with an unmatched fury, and it may have been the Cheyenne Yellow Nose who killed him.
When Tom’s body was discovered two days later, his skull had been pounded to the thickness of a man’s hand. If not for the tattoo marks on his arm, his eviscerated body would never have been identified.
Eight years before, during the weeks prior to the Washita campaign, Custer had written Libbie asking whether she might consider adopting Autie, who was then ten years old. Nothing had come of it, but now the nephew who might have become the son Custer never had lay dead beside Custer’s brother Boston.
Several warriors take off in pursuit, but the soldier’s horse is strong, and it begins to look as if he might actually get away. Then, just as the Indians give up the chase, the soldier pulls out his pistol and shoots himself in the head.
The identity of this soldier will never be definitively known. However, some recent forensic analysis of a skull found in a remote portion of the battlefield offers evidence that the lone rider may have been Lieutenant Henry Harrington, the commander of C Company.
As the warriors fought over plunder, the women, many of whom had lost loved ones that day, took a leading role in mutilating the dead. “The women used sheath-knives and hatchets,” remembered Wooden Leg, who used his own knife to scalp one of Lieutenant Cooke’s shaggy sideburns.
Twelve years before, a village of 125 lodges of Cheyenne and Arapaho had been attacked by 675 soldiers under the command of Colonel John Chivington. Chivington’s soldiers had mercilessly killed and mutilated the women and children and later displayed their lurid trophies of war at a parade in Denver. For the Native women who’d survived what was known as the Battle of Sand Creek, the mutilation of Custer’s troops provided at least a modicum of revenge.
In Sitting Bull’s sun dance vision of the falling soldiers, a voice had announced that the Lakota and Cheyenne must not touch the bodies of their enemies or take the spoils. As the smoke and dust cloud over the battlefield thinned in the northerly breeze, Sitting Bull could see that the warriors were ignoring the pronouncement. “The dead soldiers were quite plain,” remembered the Brulé woman Julia Face, who was a...
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One Bull also said his uncle predicted that for failure to comply with the wishes of the Great Spirit Wakan Tanka, the Lakota would forever “covet white people’s belongings” and ultimately “starve at [the] white man’s door.” This victory, great as it was, had simply been the prelude to a crushing and irresistible defeat.
In the story of the White Buffalo Calf Woman, the Lakota told of the young man whose lustful thoughts unleashed a dark and enveloping cloud that reduced him to a gleaming skeleton.
Custer had also succumbed to the perils of ruinous temptation. Whether it was the Cheyenne captive Monahsetah, military glory, or gold in the Black Hills, Custer had been, like the country he represented, unabashed in his greed.
Custer, they knew, had ignored his earlier promise never to attack their tribe. So they took out an awl and pierced his eardrums so that he might hear better in the afterlife.
Yet another mutilation, it turns out, was performed that day, a mutilation that was revealed only recently when an interview with Custer’s former lieutenant Edward Godfrey came to light. Out of respect for his widow, the soldiers who viewed Custer’s remains had neglected to mention that an arrow had been jammed up the general’s penis.
Two and a half days after the battle, a detail of troopers buried Custer and his brother Tom in the same grave. To protect the bodies from predators, the troopers placed the basket from an Indian travois over them and held it down with rocks. A year later, a party led by General Sheridan’s brother Michael traveled to the battlefield to retrieve the officers’ bodies. They discovered that coyotes had managed to get at the grave of the Custer brothers and spread their bones across the grassy hill.
There were, however, quite a few wounded horses and mules still lingering about the encampment. According to a surgeon with Gibbon’s Montana Column, the soldiers executed many of the animals and stripped off their skin to make rawhide thongs for the litters.
There was at least one injured horse that the soldiers refused to kill. Despite having been hit by seven different bullets and arrows, including the gunshot blast that shattered his master’s leg, Comanche, the fourteen-year-old bay gelding ridden by Captain Myles Keogh, was kept alive. He was found, Private Jacob Adams of H Company said, sitting on his haunches near Battle Ridge, “the only living thing,” it was later claimed, near Last Stand Hill. Comanche whinnied when Adams and the other soldiers approached, and once they’d dismounted and carefully helped the wounded animal to a stand, he
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It soon began to dawn on Marsh and the others that Curley was imitating the sounds of gunfire. With the help of pantomime and pencil and paper, he was telling them what he had seen a few days before from a hillside beside the Little Bighorn: the slaughter of Custer and his entire battalion.
Terry’s long, solemn face was even more somber than usual. “Captain,” he said, “you have on board the most precious cargo a boat ever carried. Every soldier here who is suffering with wounds is the victim of a terrible blunder; a sad and terrible blunder.”
Just as Custer had emerged from his final meeting with Terry uncharacteristically hesitant and depressed, so had Marsh been unnerved by the general’s attempts to inspire him.
But instead of immediately sending the Far West down the Yellowstone, Terry insisted that Marsh remain at the encampment across from the mouth of the Bighorn for an additional three days. Not until 5 p.m. on July 3 did the Far West finally start down the river toward the Missouri.
“It was,” Nugent bitterly insisted, “a difficult problem to write a report that would suit the occasion.” In the end, Terry put his name to two dispatches: one for public distribution that made no attempt to find fault; the other, a more private communication to General Sheridan that blamed the catastrophe on Custer.
Over the course of the next two and a half days, the Far West broke all speed records on the Missouri and her tributaries, traveling, Marsh later calculated, 710 miles at an average rate of 13 1/7 miles an hour.
During the day, with the current speeding her along, the Far West frequently topped twenty miles an hour as her hull scraped over the sandbars and bounced off the rocky banks of the Yellowstone, “throwing the men to the deck like tenpins.”
